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Chapter Three
THE GOLDEN SWARM
They appeared to be of a loving disposition, and lay huddled together, fast asleep, like so many pigs.
The penguin colony near Huichi's estancia had been our southernmost goal. Now, leaving Deseado behind us we drove northward across the flat purple scrub-land towards Peninsula Valdes, where, I had been assured, I would find large colonies of fur seals, and the only remaining colony of elephant seals in Argentina.
Peninsula Valdes lies on the coast of the province of Chubut. It is a mass of land rather like an axe-head, some eighty miles long by thirty broad. The peninsula is almost an island, being co
Not only had the landscape changed in colouring and mood but had suddenly become alive. We were driving down the red earth road, liberally sprinkled with back-breaking potholes,* when suddenly I caught a flash of movement in the undergrowth at the side of the road. Tearing my eyes away from the potholes I glanced to the right, and immediately trod on the brakes so fiercely that there were frenzied protests from all the female members of the party. But I simply pointed, and they became silent.
To one side of the road, standing knee-deep in the yellow bushes, stood a herd of six guanacos, watching us with an air of intelligent interest. Now guanacos are wild relatives of the llama, and I had been expecting to see something that was the same rather stocky shape as the llama, with a dirty brown coat. At least, I remembered that the one I had seen in a Zoo many years before looked like that. But either my memory had played me false* or else it had been a singularly depressed specimen I had seen. It had certainly left me totally unprepared for the magnificent sight these wild guanacos made.
What I took to be the male of the herd* was standing a little in front of the others and about thirty feet away from us. He had long, slender racehorse legs, a streamlined body, and a long slender graceful neck reminiscent of a giraffe's. His face was much longer and more slender than a lama's, but wearing the same supercilious expression. His eyes were dark and enormous. His small neat ears twitched to and fro as he put up his chin and examined us as if through a pair of imaginary lorgnettes.*
Behind him, in a tight and timid bunch, stood his three wives and two babies, each about the size of a terrier,* and they had such a look of wide-eyed i
When they got some little distance away they slowed down from their first wild gallop into a sedate, stiff-legged canter. They looked, with their russet and yellow coats, like some strange ginger-bread animals, mounted on rockers,* tipping and tilting their way through the golden scrub.
As we drove on across the peninsula we saw many more groups of guanacos, generally in bunches of three or four, but once we saw a group of them standing on a hill, outlined against a blue sky, and I counted eight individuals in the herd. I noticed that the herds were commoner towards the centre of the peninsula, and became considerably less common as you drove towards the coast. But wherever you saw them they were cautious and nervous beasts, ready to canter off at the faintest hint of anything unusual, for they are persecuted by the local sheep-farmers, and have learnt from bitter experience that discretion is the better part of valour.*
By the late afternoon we were nearing Punta del Norte on the east coast of the peninsula, and the road had faded away into a pair of faint wheel-tracks that wended their way through the scrub in a looping and vague ma
They were fascinated by the thought that I should have come all the way from England just to catch and film bichos,* and doubtless thought I was more than a little mad, though they were far too well-ma